Saturday, November 22, 2014

First, a couple of alerts for today November 22. The first one in Berkeley, CA:

Mallory Ortberg reads from Texts From Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations With Your Favorite Literary CharactersPegasus Books Downtown2349 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94704Saturday, November 22, 2014 - 7:30pmJoin Mallory Ortberg, co-creator of The Toast, in a reading from her new book, Texts From Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations With Your Favorite Literary Characters. Based on the popular web-feature, Texts from Jane Eyre is a witty, irreverent mashup that brings the characters from your favorite books into the twenty-first century.

The second one in Elkin, NC:

“Murder by the Book” opens at Elkin High’s Dixon Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday with a second performance at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets are available at the door, $5 for adults; $3 for students and children. (Kitsey E. Burns on Elkin Tribune)

Great literary road trips in The Guardian with a picture of Top Withins, of course:

Celebrate some of the women who put England on the literary map with a tour of Yorkshire and Cumbria. Start in Haworth, the village in the Pennines where the Brontë sisters, Anne, Charlotte and Emily, grew up. Visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum, furnished as it was when the family lived here, and take the short walk up to Brontë Falls and on to Top Withens, said to be the inspiration for Wuthering Heights, the house in Emily’s eponymous novel.

In the congregation we have many historical links, through our families to the sinking of the Titanic with the death of Thomas Rowan Morrow, members who fought in First and Second World Wars, United Irishmen and the Brontë family.

New Jersey Star-Ledger talks about The Hunger Games: Mockingjay and the real need of splitting the adaptation in two movies:

Since Hollywood began, it's been adapting big, unwieldy books — and always managing to do it in one go. Dickens movies often toss away fistfuls of chapters; most versions of "Wuthering Heights" discard the last half of the novel. No American studio ever asked you to see "War" one year, then come back for "And Peace" the next. (Stephen Whitty)

She takes a pragmatic view of the Centre. “It’s not Haworth, and Gissing isn’t one of the Brontes,” she says. “It’s never going to attract the numbers Haworth attracts, but it will attract the faithful few.”

Dawn (Pakistan) talks the quite subtle gender revolution taking place in Pakistan through cinema and television:

Another equally popular showZindagi Gulzar Hai sanctified a middle class dupatta-clad girl while villainising the upper class girls in western attire.The good girl/bad girl dichotomy, however, fails to erase the complexities that animate out of this binary.With a Jane Eyre-esque earnestness, the good girl pursues a career, lives apart from her husband, and carves a space, where her being is not policed by men. (Nur Ibrahim)

As he grew older, he grew into the literary adventure stories of Ernest Hemingway, and then the Sturm und Drang of novels by Thomas Hardy and the Brontë sisters. Conspicuously absent during all this journey were the stories of such evangelists for fantasy as J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, or Ursula Le Guin. (Richard Adams Carey)